


the gods who are born in the process

by cerebella



Category: Team Fortress 2
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-26
Updated: 2015-07-26
Packaged: 2018-04-11 07:39:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4426922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cerebella/pseuds/cerebella
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A brief recollection of three conversations with three different men.</p>
<p>In other words, how to lose your mind on a wide open road, and how to let sleeping dogs lie.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the gods who are born in the process

Sniper can still feel his mother's hand on his arm when he sets off on the long road.

In a couple of weeks, he'll meet Pauling for the first time.

He's... worried. It's soothing, when he picks up his rifle with a taut anxiety, only to find he still has his reflexes. Age doesn't help with these things, but years of practice does. He doesn't know what he's walking into here. He knows almost nothing about this lady Pauling, or Teufort, and he doesn't really know all that much about the Badlands, either. Only fairytales about boys that lived forever.

He's got a picture of his Mum with a basket of bread, an itchy trigger finger, and a headache the size of New Zealand. Any trace of his home disappeared from his rear-view mirror hours ago, and he's got a long way to go.

It'll go like every other drive. He'll scratch off the road he's driven on his map before he sleeps out in the cot in the back of the van, clean his guns, and try to get some rest before starting up again the next day.

He needs some semblance of comfort after a week. The roads get lonely. The gas is hardly running low, but that doesn't make him feel any better. It only reminds him how long this will all take. And if he doesn't get there on time, he has no idea what will happen. Maybe he'll be shot. Pauling was very insistent that he keep everything on the down-low.

He drives. Twenty hours a day, wind in his shirt and salt in his mouth.

Sand and dirt and rocks all seem to blend into one, vast singular entity. The world gets bigger every day, and with every hundred miles past, he feels smaller.

The worst part is, the world seems dead. He loses power this way.

He should have seen something, right? A kangaroo, maybe. A spider. A snake. He's in Australia, right? Is he? When was the last time he drank some water?

After two days of almost non-stop driving, he lifts his foot off of the gas pedal, and takes a deep breath.

Hopping out of the van, he can hear several bones in his body pop. His arse aches with a vengeance. The steering wheel has ingrained itself into his palms, and has become an unfortunate part of him. Those grainy patterns remind him of the tubs of rice in the supermarkets, and when nobody was looking, diving would his hands go into the fray.

It's hot. It's bright and windy and dry, the sun smeared on the ground. The day is lovely in all senses of the word, but he grumbles anyway. There isn't a single bone in his body that isn't complaining about sitting in the hot, cracked leather of a driver's seat for thirty-eight hours straight.

He sits on the roof of the van with a bottle of water, watching the world in silence. He needs to shave.

He isn't going to be shaving for a while.

Fuck, he's tired. Falling asleep on the roof doesn't seem like a bad idea, until he wakes up ten hours later with a snake crawling around near his front tire rather threateningly, and his back burns with having been scalded by scorching hot metal for hours on end.

And he doesn't, you know--he doesn't really care at all. He watches the snake with some semblance of relief, because the world isn't dead after all. And it found him, of all people to be found in such a pretty place.

The snake bites his tire. He swears, and kicks it away.

 

 

It isn't the first time he's opted to sleep on the top of his van, and it certainly isn't the first time he's found himself captivated with the world above. There's something familiar about it, like he belonged there at some point in his life for a few brief moments, before crashing down into this little life of his.

It feels like for a very, very small part of his life, he was a grand thing to behold. Something out of a prophecy. Everything is certainly more temperate now.

He goes to sleep looking at the night sky, cold air swirling around with sweet, honey stars in his chest--and he wakes up warm, hair tousled, feeling leftover licks of divinity in the sheen of sweat on his skin.

To start up the engine again sets something in his heart in stone: he won't be coming home for a while. At least, not home to where he knows it now.

The first gas station he passes is a relief so immense, he can feel something hard and tough in his shoulders slacken for the first time in days. Maybe it's a mirage: maybe, maybe, maybe he's lost it, but it seems perfectly real when he steps in shop, a boy sleeping at the counter.

Sniper walks around with his hands in his pockets, and he's loading water into a basket when he hears a yelp and a crash.

Now the boy is standing at the counter, looking around in a panic. "Sir?"

Sniper suppresses a laugh. "Relax, mate. I haven't nicked anything. You just seemed a bit busy."

"Fuck," the boy hisses, ruffling his hair. "I'm, uh, real sorry. Not many folk out here, you know. And they're noisier, too. Was just worried about another gun-toting jackass."

He feels a wince of pity for a moment. Partly because he's only been out on the road for a few days while this kid probably spends all his weekdays here, and partly because he has four rifles in the back of his car and two crates full of ammo. A gun-toting jackass, indeed. The kid rubs his neck. Never a prophet.

"Where you headed? That's a lot of water. Though I guess there ain't all that much near here you could be headed to. Far out?"

Sniper shrugs. "I got a strange way. Ten days more. Been on the road for four."

He hears a low whistle. "Ouch. I won't get you wrong, though, my commute's a real son of a bitch. Six hours. Not even there and back."

Sniper studies the label on a pack of gum.

"If you're traveling a way, we got a payphone out back. I'll break a dollar if you need."

He looks up: yeah, he could make a few calls. He could call Mum, because she's going to be worried--and Pauling, just to make sure he's doing everything right. "Thanks. I'll split a dollar."

"Cool. Did kind of want to make sure this cashier was still working."

Weird kid, Sniper thinks as he walks around the building. Nice, though. Not intrusive or anything--just the kind of kid who really likes bugs and doesn't want to play four square during lunch.

Not like Sniper played four square. He was in some weird mixture of homeschooling and sometimes just... appeared during a class at a public school a couple of miles from home.

He remembers getting funny looks, for a multitude of perfectly good reasons: the sunset glasses he never took off, and his hands were small but rough and bruised, and nobody even knew why he was there in the first place. Sometimes a kid would jump up in the middle of class and crook their head, and their eyes would go all wide in a rather comical way. And he would smile weakly at them with a dull glance, and then return their attention to the teacher.

When there was homework he understood, he did it. He didn't hand it in. It would get fed to a sheep, or something, but he still did it. The teachers never expected him to come back, anyway. And when he did, maybe a week later, they were almost pleasant.

Sniper's got Mum's number tapped out on the phone, and the ringing in his ear is soothing.

Click.

"Hello?" A hazy voice breaks through the static.

"Just checking in. Dad alright?" Sniper says with a faint smile on his face.

He can hear the woman's voice break into delight, and she begins to ramble: she must be stretched taut, even if he's only been gone for a few days. Perhaps it's because she knows he won't come back for a while. It's why he calls: because he never quite severs this precious connection they have, or even says a real goodbye. Because he'll come back, one way or another.

Sniper lets her chatter on, and on, and on until she finally sighs a soothed breath and says, "...But how are you, dear?"

And he's okay.

 

 

The next stop is three days later, when he's halfway there and just a little behind schedule. Here, the station's empty, and it looks like it's been that way for a long time. The floors are dusty, the walls chipped and ripe--he doesn't dare inspect the strange shadows at the corners of the ceiling, dreading some kind of hideous insect infestation.

He wanders around the bare stomach of the building, curious. Is the owner alive? Were they killed? The words 'RELIABLE EXC' are painted sloppily in fire engine red on the west wall, and they feel... familiar.

One way or another, the payphone isn't out. Someone here is paying for electricity.

It makes his neck hot, but he calls up Miss Pauling. The phone is rusty and he's hesitant to hold it directly against his ear, but there's certainly something on the other end of the line.

And he can make out words.

"The time is eleven seventeen." A voice blares through the line. "It's _cold_ down here. I've been operating this phone for several hours. I can't see two feet in front of my face. Stop asking for our paint. We don't have any left, and if we did, we wouldn't give it to you anyway."

He sort of wishes he couldn't make out said words, but they only get stranger, and louder. The background noise is almost as bad, yelling and fumbling and the occasional snaps where the phone is tossed around.

"I think I have the wrong number," Sniper grumbles. This Pauling lady really is elusive.

"I'm just playing with you. Who do you want dead?"

Sniper wrinkles his nose and holds the phone a little further. "Is there a Pauling there?"

The background noise rises to an all-time high. God, Sniper hopes he has the wrong number. There's more clattering and clinking while the phone is passed around, but the same voice comes back.

"You have reached Reliable Excavation Demolition. You know, I think humor is dead. I don't feel very appreciated. Regardless, Miss Pauling is not here. Anything else with which we can help you?"

Still, Reliable Excavation Demolition. He glances at the paint splashed on the outer wall of the gas station and furrows his brows. For a few moments, he'd almost thought it was just abstract.

"I'm in on a new contract. Do you know anything about that? I'm due in about a week, a little behind schedule."

"Yes. Take your time getting here. It's not all it's cracked up to be, quite honestly. Don't ask for me if you call again."

They hang up.

 

 

He calls again for Miss Pauling the next station he finds, and this time, she picks up after only thirteen rings. She tells him she's been busy training the team, and in particular an energetic kid who proves to be almost more trouble than he's worth.

A kid, for crying out loud. Sniper flinches inside himself when he thinks about it, gnawing his lower lip. He buys a couple of Mars bars, and a six-pack of grape soda, tucking them in the passenger seat by his semi-automatic. He knows what an itchy trigger finger can do to a teenager, and if his contract doesn't help him score a job in accounting, it's actually not too bad living life as a mercenary, wrecking of morality aside.

Résumé padding or not, arrests are no fun. He distinctly remembers spending a couple of nights jailed in a particularly interesting cell with a man covered head to toe in an immaculate, pin-striped suit who had somehow managed to work a ski-mask of all things into his mugshot. Quite an abstract sense of humor. Possibly a prophet.

He wonders what the kid is doing, shooting people full of holes for a living before he's even grown a beard. Not like he did anything different, but he was a runt in a one-pup litter.

As it happens, he gets to talk wonder kid at the next station. Jesus, he fills a basket with candy bars and pop and whatever other processed garbage he can get his hands on. He's working up a headache just listening to him, and it's hardly because the kid's so damn loud--he's *young*, for crying out loud.

"Is this your first time in the Badlands? It's real nice, but it's hot as all hell. Clear skies all around. We got hot water if you wake up early enough, too. I hope you like horror movies, 'cause if I hear another word about Titanic, I'll kick your ass. Birds fly, sun shines, boats fuckin' sink, like hell I'll cry 'bout it. Right? You can't disagree if you're gonna hurt people for a living."

"Sure," Sniper grunts. Maybe the headache _is_ because of the rambling. Why did he spend so much on candy? The last thing this kid needs is more sugar.

"Town ain't too bad, though! Let's get a beer sometime, you're cool to talk to, right? I mean you haven't said anything. But I'm sure if ya did it would be great. You probably know."

 

 

It's his last night on the road. Tomorrow is an eight-hour drive, and he's giddy just thinking about it. He sits on the van top, legs crossed with the headlights on, watching a fairly confident salamander poke around. It's a cute one. Probably popular with the ladies.

 

 

 

He dreams of a cold, salty ocean floating in the darkness in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by black air and smokey, broken sunlight. There's nothing to see, except his own limbs struggling in the water. It expands gradually, thinning out until it's stretched out like a puddle. He can feel concrete surfacing beneath his feet, and waves of light glittering in the distance. The atmosphere tastes like wine, and his hands are softer than he remembers. He can't spell his own name right now, but someone else will teach him again.

In eight years, he'll start to ask questions about the sky. In eighteen years, he'll leave home for the very first time. In twenty-eight years, he will do math at a fourth-grade level, and he will be best friends with his second ex-girlfriend.

He is thirty-eight years old, and he does not believe in ghosts anymore.


End file.
